Who’s the Owner of the Döner Kebab?
I started my search for a travel article by looking for one about Mannheim, Germany. Mannheim is the city I've spent the most travel time at, naturally, visiting, but I haven't really sat down and written a travel piece about it. After scoring the interwebs, it became obvious that I should write a travel piece about it because there isn't anything good out there. Anyways, by the end of the search, I was hungry. For this. And this article came up.
First off, if you haven't tried a Döner and have an inclination to eat meat (or even not, Lisa gets one with seasoned cheese and tofu) you must.
Anyways, this article. Yeah.
At first, I was thinking this was going to be a travel article about Berlin, but it quickly transforms into an article about the Turkish population. This is an interesting topic, especially since she was traveling from Instanbul, Turkey. The German Turks are a significant minority group and including the conversation with Stephen where he says he wants to learn to "communicate with them."
Whereas this is an interesting premise and she has a lot to say about German-Turkish history, it's lacking certain aspects:
- She talked about the train rides and how awful they were, which I felt like she could've left out and skipped to meeting people on the trains. It distracted from the story.
- I also feel like she could've put more location into the piece. Expanding more about Berlin or at least her travels in Instanbul could've added the imagery needed.
- She needed to blend the history and the food a bit more (the imagery could help).
- The paragraphs throughout the piece come off as a little disconnected.
Eat it up, guys.
I enjoyed this piece a lot as it took a single item of food and used it to bring in history, geography, and people into her writing in a way that made it very interesting and informative. I liked the discussion about Turkish immigrants and how they brought this food into Germany and how the Germans took it for themselves. The whole piece really showed how all of the countries of the world are interconnected in their way.
ReplyDeleteI do think there could've been more of a way to connect and transition in a more organized way and, like, Chelsea said, include more about the place she was currently visiting.
I liked the way she was able to use one immigrants food invention to talk about the Turkish immigrants in Germany, and then used the doner kebab as a food to connect all of these different countries, that no matter where she got off on the Eurail she could get one. I feel that she integrated the history well into her story about food. But the piece as a who felt disconnected when ever she jumped from her story about train travel to the food itself.
ReplyDeleteI didn't really care for the train business. It just sound like an ad for Eurail. Otherwise, I like the punchy writing, and the premise of the doner as a connecting food to all cultures. All of the human interactions really helped with characterization and credibility. Overall, the piece was nice, but it needed more focus and less whining, I think.
ReplyDelete